Facebook killed local newspapers by sucking up all the revenue that used to pay for the person who’d sit in on council meetings and spell your nephews’ name incorrectly. Now they’re starting to feel bad about that, so they’re throwing a tiny percentage of their revenue toward appearing to do something about the problem. Mathew Ingram, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review:
In a blog post, Facebook’s Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown, calls the project “a $3 million, three-month pilot program to help metro newspapers take their digital subscription business to a new level.” Conspicuously absent, not surprisingly, was any mention of the main reason why newspapers and other media entities are being forced to rely on subscription revenue—namely, that Facebook and Google have vacuumed up the vast majority of digital advertising over the past few years, leaving much of the media industry with nothing but a giant, smoking crater where its ad revenue used to be.
If nothing else I’m glad Facebook at least sees value in appearing to value local journalism, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to the hole left by declining advertising revenue. Three million also, as Ingram points out, “amounts to 0.007 percent of Facebook’s 2017 revenues.”
This is a PR stunt, nothing more, and while it may help a couple of newspapers increase subscriber revenue it doesn’t begin to offset the challenges this ecosystem is facing. No realistic amount of subscription revenue is going to replace the ad money that’s never coming back.
Local journalism needs a whole lot more than occasional tech industry charity if it’s going to sustain democracy. It needs an entirely new model, and subscriptions alone isn’t going to cut it.
